I’m appalled by this from the Mail. Ugly, straightforward racism, and amplifying the spurious claim of its favoured candidate (even the Reform party chair said last week that any irregularities wouldn’t have changed the result).

Well, no, they’re not just as wrong. The bigger error is not seeing that “trying to win over voters from a party on the opposite end of the spectrum, whose values your core voters oppose” is not same as “chasing voters from party on same side ideologically whose values your core voters like.”

Very clear that for Starmer, 'sectarian voting' is when British Muslims don't vote Labour, and for many others, it is just when British Muslims vote.

The real threat to democracy doesn't come from 'family voting'. It comes from the losing side refusing go accept they've lost

Can't get over the horror of this story.

Extraordinary graph.

Sectarian. The sheer contempt and entitlement in that word. Thousands of Muslim voters just voted for a white, (I think) working class non-Muslim woman because they feel abandoned by Labour and agree with her views on a huge foreign policy issue and on immigration policy

If the Muslims were integrated, they would have…voted for a more socially conservative candidate? As ever “Want to get stupider? Try Racism (TM)” never fails.

I was at the count in Gorton and Denton last night and we all saw Matt Goodwin eat ballot papers. His girlfriend and team begged him to stop but he kept stuffing it into his mouth and making grunting sounds like the Cookie Monster

The current argument of the British right is that Muslims turned out in "blocs" with "family voting" to cast their ballots for a party led by a gay Jewish man, and this shows that multiculturalism has failed, voting is "sectarian" and we are in a crisis. Hmmmmmm.

You got to feel for Matt Goodwin. Sorry missed a word. You got to feel contempt for Matt Goodwin.

Great thread.

What a photo

The Green victory in Denton is the result which will have the biggest effect on Labour, far more so than a Reform win. The blithe assumption progressives have nowhere else to go has been proved catastrophically wrong. Can’t help thinking of this quote from a Labour minister, a year ago…

This is a great piece (written pre by-election result) that really gets to the heart of Labour’s vote haemorrhaging.

Sort of forgot that this whole thing was still going www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

They beat a blind refugee who speaks no English for failing to obey police commands he could not understand. Then instead of apologizing, they charged him with possession of a “weapon”—HIS WALKING STICK. Then they dumped him miles from home without notifying anyone, after which he was found dead.

Stuart is almost halfway to his target - if you can donate anything please do!

When I did Lord of the Flies for GCSE, you could borrow an old copy if you forgot yours. One genius had crossed out the title and written "LORD OF THE SHITS" and then every time the word "conch" appeared, circled it and written in the margin: "CONCH". Those were the only annotations.

Cool! Fine! Good! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Can't wait for this to be replicated at a general election and end up with government-by-random-number-generator

Restore Britain's language is not just racist it's now indistinguishable from Neo-Nazi groups.

The UK parliament now has an MP who is openly racist and far right. This is, for the current era, new ground, and it will be interesting to see how - if at all – other MPs respond.

Never ceases to amaze me that AI technology is so widely relied upon in areas where it fundamentally doesn't work (example 1001 here, making up case law!) observer.co.uk/news/science...

Stuart is almost halfway to his target - if you can donate anything please do!

Why local journalism matters, in a nutshell

This is so bleak www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is a serious and worrying failure by media - Reform need to be pressed on the core legal and moral issues at stake here

When Reform talks about bringing in DOGE-style cuts or ICE-style immigration enforcement, who is the domestic constituency in favour of that? I just don't think your average British voter looks at chaos of Trump's second term and thinks "yes let's have some of that"

Two years ago I had the privilege of profiling Stuart Potts, who runs a makeshift homeless shelter out of his one-bed flat in Manchester. I can't overstate how generous it is, what Stuart does: helping people who have nowhere else to go, with no personal benefit www.theguardian.com/society/2024...

Interesting data, and another argument in favour of people who shape the political and news agenda getting off X.

Would pay money for a version of the internet where I don't have to encounter any more takes about Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights

If this doesn't rouse them, nothing will

Josh Simons knocking on your door, swivel-eyed, demanding 'are you now or have you ever ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ lived with a left-wing member of the Labour Party?'

Truly whacko behaviour from Josh Simons and Labour Together. Trying to get the intelligence services to investigate critical journalists! He's got to go www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I'm back at work after maternity leave and currently trying to write my first article since March 2025. Feels like pulling teeth! What are sentences, what are words, who am I ???

Carney's incredible secret sauce seems to be - say what the problem is, whose fault it is, what you will have to do about it and what it will cost.

Reform's polling is ~the lowest its been since last year's local elections

Hannah has done an incredible amount of work to bring some much needed scrutiny onto the hidden world of the family courts. The outcome of this case shows why this is so important.

In the last week I’ve had notifications from my kids’ nursery/school warning of a measles outbreak in my borough. It’s stressful since my youngest is under-1 so not vaccinated yet. Perhaps naively I didn’t realise anti-vax sentiment was so prevalent in the UK as to lose herd immunity.

Yep... every time I've attended a court hearing I feel like I must be doing something wrong as it seems incomprehensible that it's so difficult to find out when and if it's happening .

I'm quite surprised the government is appealing the High Court ruling that the Palestine Action proscription was unlawful - it's been disastrous for the government, why drag it out any further?

Babies as an antidote to women having intellectual and political lives is a tale as old as time, and anyone advocating for it is by definition a wrong 'un.

This is appalling.

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

I probably shouldn’t be shocked by this but I am. It’s terrible and extremely depressing news.

A staggering statement from former Washington Post editor Marty Baron: "This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations."

Wes Streeting saying on Today that Mandelson is ‘not the man we thought he was’ but the trouble is, he is exactly the man we thought, just on a much worse scale than almost anyone thought. And there is an alternative world where none of this is this govt’s problem, because they never gave him a job

'measles outbreak at the child prison' seems entirely avoidable, it's really the kind of thing that only happens if you do several unthinkably evil things on purpose all at once